‘Arco’: a dystopia open to a utopia of colors | Cinema: premieres and reviews

Sad and at the same time optimistic, dystopian and utopian, Arco is a French animated science fiction film that travels from a turbulent near future to a much more distant time in which environmental hope and colors fit. First feature of the cartoonist Ugo Bienvenu, Arco jumps between 2075 and nine centuries later to talk about childhood loneliness, artificial intelligence, climate change and friendship. The film is also a candidate for the Oscar in the animated feature category.

Bienvenu’s film, intended for a family audience, tells the adventure of Arco, a 10-year-old boy, son of a species of flying rainbow heroes, who disobeys his parents and accidentally falls into a past (our near future) harassed by fires and storms. There he meets Iris (the game with the names Arco and Iris is from its origin in Spanish), a girl who receives the care of her robot Mikki, while her parents, who work far away, are holograms that she cannot hug.

On its journey between the 21st and 30th centuries, Arco is indebted to the Japanese Studio Ghibli anime or ET and the time travel of two French comic references that are inevitable in the science fiction universe: Moebius and René Laloux. Even so, the feature film debut of Bienvenu – renowned illustrator of current French comics, director of animated short films, music videos, Chanel advertisements and even Hermès scarves – shows signs of a broad personality of his own that collects elements from his graphic work (such as the robot Mikki) to talk about post-human memory or a future capable of being reborn with the ideas of regenerative architecture.

The main potential of Arco It is in many of its ideas (the glasses of the adult characters, the character of Mikki, the game of doors to other worlds at school…), but also in its doses of tenderness, in its emotional final stretch and in a script that avoids falling into a reality of heroes and villains. With well-orchestrated music and a chorus of voices, in its original French version it features some as well-known as those of Louis Garrel and Vincent Macaigne, who put their vocal cords at the service of those criminals with rainbow glasses who, from their marginality, allow themselves to be blinded by the hope that this debut proposes.